Do they even realize that everything they say to me about trust is a two-way street? That I have to trust them, too?
Clicking on an email with the subject “RJ testing?” I read that Dad’s written:
I’m worried about RJ’s grades. I think we should have him tested. I think he has a learning disability of some kind that’s preventing him from achieving the way he should. We need to make sure he has every support he needs to get into a top college.
I thought RJ was just being oversensitive. Turns out he was right.
Mom is a lot more laid-back when it comes to RJ than she is about me. No murderous impulses expressed about her beloved son.
There’s nothing the matter with RJ. Maybe he’s just not as academic as Sammy. He has other strengths.
Dad apparently didn’t buy that argument.
You have a blind spot when it comes to him, Helene. You can’t keep making excuses for RJ.
I hate that there are people outside our family reading this. I want to make RJ a fort of soft blankets and pillows like I did when we were little, so he can hide inside and none of this will hurt him.
If only it were that easy. I wouldn’t mind living out the rest of high school in an awesome blanket fort.
Besides all her work stuff, there are emails about car pools, about who is picking up who when, about PTA meetings, book club meetings (“bring your fave dessert, a bottle of vino, and your opinion”), and other stuff that Mom has to deal with.
There’s one with the subject line :( from Mom to Dad.
Sometimes I feel like Samantha hates me with every fiber of her being. Every single thing that comes out of my mouth is apparently evidence of what an out-of-touch, politically incorrect, wrong-about-everything person I am. After a particularly bad fight this morning, I found myself looking at pictures of toddler Sammy and me, longing for her to gaze at me with that look of love and reverence, as though I am the center of her world just for one day, instead of the usual scorn.
Yes, I know, I’m being pathetic and ridiculous. I keep telling myself what my mom and the parenting articles tell me: This is age appropriate. The teen years are when kids start to break away from their parents and form their own identities and ideas, and it’s never an easy process—as Mom is always quick to remind me. But it’s so exhausting. And incredibly painful.
Never mind me. I’m just having a bad morning. Scruffles is nagging me for walkies, and I’m sure we’ll both feel better afterward.
XO Hels
Guilt blooms in my stomach. Because I don’t hate my mom. I just wish she understood me a little more. Cut me some slack. Trusted me.
Dad wrote back to her:
Sammy loves you, Helene, even if she’s not showing it right now. Give her time and space. You’re a great mom and the love of my life. XO Dick.
I close the computer.
Gross. I feel like a voyeur reading my father’s profession of love to my mother.
Except it’s already been read 105,988 times, according to the website stats.
All those people know how much I’ve hurt my mom. My mom who has cancer.
They must hate me.
I can’t really blame them.
I kind of hate myself right now.
Loud stomping comes up the stairs and then I hear RJ’s door slam. For a few minutes, I debate if I should go to him, but I know that he must be freaking out after hearing about Mom. So I suck it up, go to his room, and listen outside the door. He’s definitely crying, but the sound is muffled, like he’s doing it into a pillow. I knock and say, “RJ, it’s me,” then go in without him saying it’s okay, because whether he knows it or not, he needs me. Not just because of Mom. Because of what’s happening outside our family.
The truth is, I need him, too.
My brother is curled up on his bed, with Scruffles lying next to him, licking the tears off his face. I sit on the bed and hug them both.
“What if Mom dies?” RJ sniffs.
I don’t want to lie to him and say she won’t, because I don’t know if that’s the truth, and I’m sick of lies. All I can tell him is what I do know.
“We’re going to do everything we can to make sure that doesn’t happen. All of us. You, me, Dad, the doctors, and most of all, Mom. Because that’s the last thing that she wants” is what I say.
Scruffles gives me a lick as if encouraging me to go on.
“Mom wants to be here for us as much as we want her to be. She wants to see us graduate. She wants to see us get married and have kids.”
“Ew. She’s going to have to live a long time for the married part,” RJ says. “Because I’m not getting hitched till I’m like … thirty. And kids … I don’t know if I want them ever. Too much work.”
I laugh. “Maybe if they’re like you. I’ve been a total piece of cake to raise.”
“Oh, right,” RJ snorts. “Piece of cake, huh? Sneaking off to concerts and fighting with Mom all the time?”
That wipes the smile from my face. You better come home from work at a decent hour tonight or I might murder your daughter … Sometimes I feel like Samantha hates me with every fiber of her being.
“I guess I haven’t exactly been all sugar and spice, huh?”
“Ya think? It’s like living with a walking time bomb. We never know when you’re going to explode next.”
It’s not easy to look at yourself in the brother mirror, especially when you realize he’s right. Taking a deep breath, I tell him the conclusion I’ve drawn from reading the hacked documents.
“Something’s wrong with us, RJ, and it’s not just Mom’s cancer.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why didn’t we know any of this before the hackers? How come we never talked about it until now?”
RJ sits up suddenly, startling Scruffles, who circles and then plops down again between us, gazing up at me with a bemused expression.
“We do talk. At least we kind of talk. We have dinner together more than a lot of my friends do. And we’re not allowed to have devices at the table like Tim’s family or have the TV on during meals, like Joe’s,” he adds. “When I go to friends and they have a TV on during meals, they really don’t talk.”
“Okay. So … we talk about getting good grades. About getting into the best college so we can get a well-paying job. About what movies we saw and where we’re going on vacation, and what happened at work,” I point out. “But not about how I feel like I’m a hamster on a wheel that never stops and you feel like Mom and Dad think that there’s something wrong with you and Dad says one thing at work and different things at home or that Mom has freaking cancer. That’s what we don’t talk about. Why did it take the hackers to show us what was happening in our own house?”
RJ fiddles with the tags on Scruffles’ collar.
“Today this kid at school said, ‘Your dad thinks you’re a retard.’ He said that it was in the emails the hackers posted.”
I feel a flood of fury. I want to go to the middle school and punch this kid for saying that to my brother. What does he know?
Just what he read in Dad’s email, I realize. My fury disappears.
“He’s lying,” I say, which is basically the truth. Dad didn’t use the R-word. “Don’t listen to him. Mom and Dad love you and they’re proud of you.”
“I wish we didn’t have to go to school,” RJ says. “I wish we could find some really rich person to lend us their luxury house on a private desert island where there’s no Internet for a month or two, or however long it takes for this to blow over.”
“I’d be up for that,” I say. “It sounds like total heaven. As long as we go after my driving test.”
April 12
It’s three in the freaking morning and I’m wide-awake. You know things are bad when you’re awake before the birds start singing the Dawn Chorus. I’ve tried getting back to sleep, but it’s no good. I keep tossing and turning as I imagine how awful it’s going to be walking into school today. At least yesterday the cat ha
d the possibility of being alive in the box. But today the box is open, the cat is dead, my journal is public, my privacy is gone, and I still haven’t heard back from my two best friends, even though I texted them about Mom’s cancer.
There’s a sharp pain in my stomach. I wonder if it’s my appendix. On the plus side, having appendicitis would give me a good excuse not to go to school. But if I have appendicitis, I’d have to postpone my driving test, and that would be tragic. So I guess I’m going to have to suck it up. Find the courage to go to school and face all the people talking about me, judging me for the things I wrote in my journal. Find the courage to face the consequences of my actions—and the hackers’ actions, too.
Today is the first full school day of the rest of my friendless, loser high school life.
It’s going to be a wonderful day, I can tell already.
Oh, wait, I’m supposed to be thinking positively for Mom. I’m failing at that miserably, and it’s only Day One. I’ve got to practice positive thinking so I get better at it. Nothing bad is going to happen to my mother because I’m being Ms. Glass Half-Empty. No, I’m going to be a regular Annie from now on. “The sun will come out tomorrow!” “Tomorrow” is my new theme song, even though hearing it makes me want to poke out my eyeballs with a fork.
I’ll go crazy in less than a day if I have that song as an earworm. An inspiring quote would be better. Winston Churchill must have said something. Sure enough, just searched for “Winston Churchill quotes, positive” and found this one, which is attributed to him but he might not have actually said. Whatever. It sounds like something he’d say.
“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”
Okay, I have to start looking for the opportunities in my difficulties, which are currently … many. Let’s see … Becoming a social outcast means I’ll have more time to study for APs, and so I’ll do really well and get into a top college and graduate and get a killer job. (And hopefully my boss won’t make comments about me like Dad’s colleagues did about Aisha Rana in that email.) Okay, that wasn’t 100 percent positive. Baby steps.
Here’s another maybe Churchillism:
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.”
As encouraging as it is to learn that failure isn’t fatal, it’s kind of a bummer to know that success isn’t permanent. Does that mean the rest of my life is going to consist of more running on the same hamster wheel, just in a different place? Because, just, ugh.
No matter what the answer, it all comes down to finding the “courage to continue.” Even if that means walking into school when you realize that most people have probably read your most intimate thoughts. If I can do it without wanting to hurl, I’ll call that success.
Maybe I should listen to Grandpa Marty. He’ll complain about his latest medical ailment—with Mom and Dad rolling their eyes in the background—but he inevitably finishes with a shrug and says, “Well, not to worry. It’s better than the alternative.”
When I was little, I never understood what the alternative was. It took me a long time to figure out he meant death.
Positive motto for today: “It’s better than death.”
At least I hope it will be.
Dad’s already left for work by the time we get up for school, but Mom is armed with coffee, pancakes, and a pep talk.
“I know today is going to be hard,” she says. “Not just today. It’s going to be hard for a while.”
“How long?” RJ asks. How can he still believe Mom knows all the answers?
“That’s the tricky part,” she says. “We don’t know.” She puts down her coffee mug and takes each of our hands. “But I am going to promise you this: We’re going to get through this together, as a family.”
I look her in the eye. “No more secrets?”
“No more secrets,” she promises.
I really want to believe her.
Margo is standing out front with her student government friends when I get off the bus. She tries to give me the cold shoulder when I walk by, looking the other way and pretending she doesn’t see me, but I’m not going to be an ostrich.
“Margo.”
She turns and it’s like looking into the face of a stranger. There’s no warmth, no friendship. There’s not even hot anger. There’s just … cold indifference.
“What?” she says.
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly. She’s not going to make this easy for me.
“You should be,” she says, and turns away.
I didn’t expect her to forgive me right away, but I also didn’t expect her to completely turn her back on me like this. Not when my mom has cancer.
“Maybe you should be, too,” I say to her back. “It’s not like you’ve been the best friend, either.”
She whirls around and faces me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you didn’t even call me when I texted you to tell you my mom has cancer. I don’t care what happened between us. I would have called you.”
“Sure you would,” Margo sniffs.
I look her straight in the eye. “Yeah. I would have. And that’s the difference between us.”
I turn and walk away, biting my lip on the hurt and anger that threatens to overflow. As I do, I can hear her bad-mouthing me to her friends. Which sucks. But, honestly, I kind of don’t care at this point. I’ll give her cookies to someone who deserves them more. Maybe I’ll eat them myself.
I hope Rosa will be more understanding. We’ve been friends since first grade, which has to count for something. But she hasn’t answered any of the texts I’ve sent her, even the one telling her about Mom’s cancer. I thought she might call. Or at least send an emoji-filled text back. Something.
But instead … silence.
I can’t stand the idea that I might lose Rosa.
I know I wrote some thoughtless things in my journal, but can they outweigh all our years of friendship? They weren’t ever meant to be seen—they were just things I wrote to vent, in private. Can I really be blamed for this?
Jamie Moss is hanging out with his lax bro crew near the front door. If I had more time, I’d turn around and walk the entire way around the building to use one of the back doors to avoid having to pass by, but unfortunately, I don’t have the option. I have to take a deep breath, activate my outer shell, and hope that Grandpa Marty is right and this really is better than the alternative.
“Hey, Sammy, what’s the probability that you’re the biggest nerd at Brooklawne High?” Nick Snow asks.
“Maybe we should make a decision tree to decide!” Peter O’Doule smirks.
Like you’d even know how.
“Nah, I think the probability is one hundred percent.”
Even staring straight ahead, without looking, I know the last voice is Jamie.
Keep walking. Just keep going. Put one foot in front of the other and don’t let them see you break.
“Did you see the pictures from her Photo Booth?” Nick sneers. “Nice duckface.”
“More like dorkface.” Jamie laughs.
He is such a tool. He’s also stupid. He’s the one who has been copying my freaking homework. That’s what gives me the courage to turn around and say, “How would you know the first thing about probability, Jamie, when you copy my homework because you’re too lazy and dumb to do your own?”
I don’t stick around for a response. I’m more worried about making it into school without losing it. But the laughter follows me through the entrance and stays in my head after the door closes behind me.
How am I going to survive today? And even if I manage to get through today, how will I make it through the next day—and the day after that? Summer is still weeks away.
The weight of it all makes me want to curl up under a desk and hide.
Think positive. Look for the opportunities in your difficulties.
Drawing a blank here, Sir Winston. I
’ll have to get back to you on that later. If I live that long.
“Hey, Sammy—wait up!”
I turn around to see BethAnn Jackson hurrying to catch up with me. “Listen, Sammy, I just wanted to say … I read your journal and—”
She stops, seeing the stricken expression on my face. “Look, I’m sorry I read it, because I know it’s private and I shouldn’t have. But everyone else was reading it and they said you’d written about me, so …” She trails off, a slow flush tingeing her cheeks.
I stare at her, waiting.
“So anyway, I read it and I’m sorry … but I also wanted to say thank you,” BethAnn finally says.
“For what?” I ask, surprised that anyone would be thanking me for anything today.
“For understanding. About how I felt when Gary Harvey asked me to the prom and everyone was chanting to say yes and so I did, but I didn’t want to go with him, and then when I told him that after—”
“He made that awful video,” I say.
She shudders. “I know! Like I owed it to him to go to prom because he’d already posted his promposal video on YouTube. I hate it. I don’t even want to go to prom anymore.”
“Well, I doubt I’ll be going.” I sigh. “Not now that everyone knows I make decision trees to calculate my preferences for the various outcomes of who might ask me.”
BethAnn giggles. “You have to admit, it is pretty funny.”
“According to Nick Snow, it makes me the biggest nerd at Brooklawne High.”
“We all figure those odds vaguely in our head,” BethAnn says. “You’re just the only one I know who calculated it using actual numbers and probability trees. It’s impressive in its own dorky way.”
“Well, unfortunately, it means the probability of my having a date for the rest of my high school life is now zero,” I say.
“Look, I know from what happened to me that it’s not going to be a whole lot of fun for you at school for a while,” BethAnn says. “And I just wanted to say … well, if you need someone to talk to, I’m here.”
We’ve really only known each other superficially until now. But she’s being nicer to me than my supposed best friends. I guess she knows how it feels to be ostracized for something that’s out of your control.
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